John W. McLeod, RS, MPH

Director, Environmental Health Services

Cuyahoga CountyBoard of Health

Parma, Ohio44130

Biography

John W. McLeod currently serves as the Director of Environmental Health Services for the Cuyahoga County District Board of Health where he has been employed for the last 26 years.His leadership responsibilities include 51 full time and 10-12 seasonal interns through 4.6 million dollar budget.Assuring the core public health functions by delivering the agency mission, vision and core values through his staff on a daily basis is critical to his agency's success. John believes in continuous quality improvement and developing a competent well equipped workforce who are poised for change and who have the capacity to apply the ten essential services for environmental public health that meet the public health needs with our communities. John's also believes in practicing an open style of management that encourages open communication, shared ideas, and continuous sustainable growth through positive personal and programmatic development. Maintaining a positive outlook, patience, active listening, empathy and envisioning global solutions are key characteristics in John's pragmatic managerial practice.

John has a baccalaureate degree in biology from IndianaUniversity. After twenty years in public health practice, John returned to school and completed a Masters in Public health degree from the University of Akron while at the same time directing our Community Health Services Division.During this brief tenure, he experienced and directed the applications of community based programming in many issues such as access to care, chronic disease prevention, cancer screening, lead poisoning prevention, child death, teenage pregnancy prevention, and access to dental health to name a few.This education and experience brought John a whole new perspective and understanding of public health that ultimately provided new ideas for integrating environmental public health programming with other public health disciplines.

He has been involved on numerous technical and planning committees while also serving on elected positions as Secretary and President of the Ohio Environmental Health Association. While a leader of our statewide environmental health association in the mid 1990's he sensed stagnation and lack of vision in our profession, and began to encourage and inspire out of the box thinking. This was accomplished through journal messages, through the establishment of new committees and through whatever medium available, locally, statewide and nationally.

John has been published through his work on the West Nile Virus seroprevalence study in CuyahogaCounty in 2002 and has assisted with the development of publications associated with his involvement with the Idiopathic Pulmonary Hemorrhage of Infants outbreak investigation in Greater Cleveland and the Legionnaires outbreak investigation at the Ford Motor Company in Brook Park, Ohio.

Leadership Development Opportunities

EPHLI is not only about revitalizing Environmental Public Health, it is about fostering our leadership potential and transforming how we conduct our business of protecting the people we serve. I am honored to be a part of this revitalization to help realign our roots to meet new emerging challenges through increased collaborations, increased public involvement, improved market awareness and the increased use of applications involving our core public health functions and disciplines. EPHLI encourages reflection; critical thinking and the identification of individual characteristics that will help us understand and better communicate with colleagues and our customers. The opportunity to bond and share our ideas, experiences and visions for our future has been immense.These new relationships and connections will help make us all better as we can continually share best practices and together promote similar public health interests both nationally and in our communities.The excellent EPHLI leaders, faculty and staff have instilled the key message about continuous quality improvement in all aspects from the individual to the understanding of the systems we engage. This will benefit us, our organizations and our communities as we continually practice and transcend this EPHLI experience.